I am currently on annual leave for three weeks so thought I would do a blog about the benefits of taking a break from work can have.
Annual leave isn’t just an opportunity for you to go on holiday somewhere. It is a chance for you to hit that reset button and focus on your mind and body. Whatever you do for work and whatever you face on a day-to-day basis, it is likely you are under stress in one way or another.
Interestingly, I have noticed that in my workplace, several employees don’t even use all of their holiday entitlement. There are many reasons why people do this, including the pressures of work, wanting to stay on top of the ‘in tray’, worrying that we should always look diligent and be seen to have a willingness to go the extra mile, or simply not knowing that having sufficient rest breaks is vital to maintaining our wellbeing, regardless of our personal circumstances.
Over the last 18 months, the trend of reducing time off has understandably been exacerbated by the pandemic. Working from home, travel restrictions, and generalised anxiety about the risks of travel in general have led to a tendency for some to decide to just work on through and cut annual leave time.
However, even if you don’t have a holiday booked or something to do, just take some time off. Even if you ‘do nothing’, you can still obtain the benefits of being away from work.
Benefits of Taking Leave
Rest Allows You to Reset
There is so much research out there on how to increase your productivity, how to get more done or how to be more successful. However, something fundamental to all of these is the key role played by ‘rest’, and the importance of time-out in our lives.
Many people think that rest will reduce productivity, as people think that they need to spend every hour they can doing work. However, taking time out to rest can provide you with the energy and motivation you need to succeed. It allows you to take a step back, refocus and look at things with a fresh lens.
Helps You Avoid Burnout
Burnout is real, and not taking proper breaks can lead to this.
Burnout has been extensively studied across high-stress professional work environments and is characterised by emotional exhaustion, a decline in work performance, poor decision-making, higher rates of error, and the tendency to develop a lack of empathy towards colleagues and clients.
Burnout can cause people to become detached from their work and often feel that their work has little value to themselves or others.
Research has concluded that whatever short-term benefits may be achieved through over-work and delaying taking annual leave, they are entirely overshadowed by the long-term costs of lost productivity, errors, and abbreviated careers.
Taking Leave is Important for Your Health
This is probably the most important factor and underlies the two benefits above.
Extensive research has shown that taking annual leave for its designed purpose, which is to give yourself time to detach from the challenges and demands of work, is tremendously important for your mental and physical wellbeing.
As I noted above, this doesn’t even need to be a fancy holiday abroad or weeks off work. Even a few days of vacation can bring benefits. For example, a study performed in 2018 investigated the effects of short vacations (4-nights) and different modes of vacation (whether at home or in a new environment) on the stress and well-being of Middle-Managers.
Results indicated that one single short-term vacation, independent of the mode, has large, positive and immediate effects on perceived stress, recovery, strain, and well-being. The effects can also still be detected at 30 days (recovery) and 45 days (well-being and strain) post-vacation.
In addition, long-term health studies such as The Framingham Heart Study found that over a 20-year period, women who vacated regularly were less prone to getting heart attacks than women who took less leave.
Make the Most Out of Your Breaks
A German sociologist known as Sabine Sonnentag has carried out extensive research over 20 years into what type of rest best helps re-charge one’s emotional and physical balance. Her book can be found here.
To summarise, Sonnentag’s research identified 4 major factors that contribute to rest and recovery:
Relaxation
This can be achieved by pursuing pleasant and undemanding activities that don’t require a great deal of conscious effort and shouldn’t feel like work. However, these don’t have to be entirely passive pastimes.
Mental Detachment
Breaks from the normal routine of work and home life are a key factor in promoting rest.
Knowing that you can’t be contacted because you are out of range of a signal helps make it easier to relax and focus on what you are doing whilst relaxing!
I highly recommend putting on your ‘Out of Office’ and ‘Automatic Replies’, so people know you are away and are less likely to contact you.
Control
In rest and recovery, control means having the power to decide how you want to spend your time on your rest break.
If you don’t have much control over what happens at work and outside work, and you are also responsible for home duties and chores, you will have higher levels of day-to-day stress.
Being able to control your time on holiday will therefore be an important and restorative factor for you.
Mastery Experiences
Mastery experiences are engaging and interesting activities that you enjoy doing. They can be mentally absorbing and challenging and help to push thoughts of work out of your mind.
These types of activities provide all-round well-being rewards. They can include things like mastering a new recipe in the kitchen, learning a new hobby such as knitting or woodwork, or even engaging in some DIY at home or in your garden.
For me, I have been mastering my baking skills and am currently trying to bake the perfect chocolate cake!
Of course, everyone is unique and will have certain preferences to taking time off. However, if you are fortunate enough to be allowed time off, take it!
The short and long-term benefits this will bring you and others cannot be overlooked.
